Book Information: Hecuba

Euripides’ Hecuba is one of the few tragedies that evoke a sense of utter desolation and destruction in the audience. The drama focuses on the status of women, those who are out of power and at the margins of society, by enacting the sufferings of Hecuba. With the city of Troy fallen, Hecuba and Polyxena, her daughter, are enslaved to Agamemnon. Hecuba is despondent with the news that Polyxena is chosen to be sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles. After the sacrifice, the body of her son Polydorus, already a ghost at the start of the drama, is discovered. Polymestor, a king in Thrace who Hecuba sent Polydorus to for safety reasons, murdered Polydorus for his gold. With the tacit complicity of Agamemnon, Hecuba plots her revenge against Polymestor. What transpires next has lasting implications for all involved, including a dramatic trial scene and Hecuba’s ultimate metamorphosis.

Edition #4: Hecuba

My goal here has been to produce a translation that has as little to do with me as possible; this means I do not introduce any new metaphors through the process of translation, I try to keep the English lines as close to their Greek counterparts in number and placement as I can without making the English excessively awkward, and I try to translate the Greek into English using the same English words consistently. This translation will thus not be the most poetic available (though I do sometimes strive to render Euripides’ use of alliteration) and sometimes English idiom will be sacrificed to the goal of preserving the flow of ideas from the original Greek lines, though without, I hope, falling into the trap of “translationese.” What is gained is a more accurate approximation of Euripides’ Greek than has sometimes been the case in translations of the Hecuba so that readers can follow shifts in word use and language more coherently. Another result of a more literal translation is that English words will now show Euripides’ insistence on certain key themes as embodied in the drama’s language.

Edition #5: Hecuba

Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly recreate the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. The series seeks to recover the entire extant corpus of Greek tragedy, quite as though the ancient tragedians wrote in the English of our own time.